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A few days ago I was attempting to clear out some space on my laptop, and I noticed that the C: drive had a folder in it that I had never seen before, last modified roughly two months ago. The name of the folder is gibberish (7269fc8c96ae93bbc9c4d3), and it is locked. It contains mostly folders (all named four numbers, like 1033, 1035), and a few files I can open the folder, but I cannot access any of the folders or files inside. When I try to open them I get the message "You don't currently have permission to access this folder," with the option to continue. When I click continue, it says "You have been denied access to this folder." Then it tells me to change settings in the security tab, but all the settings are greyed out for me.

I only have two accounts on the computer, and the one I'm using is the administrator. I can run other files as administrator no problem, but this one is really worrying me. My computer has also been running very slowly the past few weeks, but I'd chalked it up to the amount of crap I've accumulated over the 4 or so years I've owned this laptop.

So, I ran malwarebytes (I always have Premium running), and it said that I have some issue with the spigot search program. I quarantined it and rebooted, only to find that it still showed up on the scan. Other than that, no malware was detected.

I then tried to run hijackthis, and got the lengthy message: "For some reason your system denied access to the hosts file. If any hijacked domains are in this file, Hijackthis may not be able to fix them." Then it told me how to edit the file myself, which I am nervous to do (I'm nervous to use hijackthis at all, honestly).

I was now afraid of a reformat, so I started putting some files onto my external hard drive, only to find a few minutes later that the HD suddenly has a new folder on it, with a similar gibberish title, and is also unaccessable to me.

I'm not stupid when it comes to computers, but I'm certainly no expert either. Can anybody please give me a hand with this? Is it even something to worry about?

Thank you for the prompt reply! Here's the log that I got from "results." I also ran malwarebytes again, and this time got two items, one called "conduit" and another called "superfish." I quarantined them, but have included the log below as well.

I am sorry to revive an old thread, but this recently happened to me. I had a file named 3260d4ae2fcf4f0559dbca copied to my external harddrive, though it was not locked for me. The only file inside is setupengine.dll and says the last modified was early 2010. It has all the Microsoft digital signatures on it. I was not sure if my computer was compromised in some way, and this is the only thread I found that was similar. I am hoping that this just randomly happens from time to time. Should I roll back my computer just to be safe?